JUSTIN HILL

Justin Hill has been likened to a George Orwell, a boxer, and Tolstoy. He attended the same school as Guy Fawkes - St Cuthbert’s Society, Durham - and then spent seven years as a volunteer with VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) in rural China and Africa.

His first novel, The Drink and Dream Teahouse was chosen by the Washington Post as one of the Top Novels of 2001. It won the 2003 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a 2002 Betty Trask Award, and has been banned by the government in China.

His second novel, Passing Under Heaven, won the 2005 Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Encore Award.

Ciao Asmara, a factual account of his time in Eritrea, was shortlisted for the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

In 2001, Justin was listed in the Independent on Sunday's Top 20 Young British Writers. In October 2005 he was awarded the Xiaoxiang Friendship Award by the Governor of Hunan Province, for his services to China.

His work has been translated into fourteen languages.

His new fiction is set in 11th century England, culminating in the battle of Hastings in 1066. Little, Brown published the first book, Shieldwall in 2011 to critical acclaim and it was named a Sunday Times Book of the Year. The sequel, Viking Fire, was published in 2016 and also named a Book of the Year.

Praise for Viking Fire:

'Viking Fire is a sophisticated, subtle evocation of a brutal age' (Sunday Times)

'This evocative tale of war and glory draws us into a Viking world of heroic frozen battlegrounds and treacherous perfumed palaces' (Sunday Express)

'Fights aplenty, but this is a literary, intelligent read from a masterly storyteller' (Antonia Senior, The Times)

In 1035, a young fifteen year old Viking is dragged wounded from the battle. Left for dead, for the next twenty years his adventures lead him over mountains, down the length of Russia and ultimately to Constantinople and the Holy City of Jerusalem.

Drawn into political intrigue he will be the lover of Empresses, the murderer of an emperor; he will hold the balance of power in the Byzantine Empire in his hands, and then give it all up for a Russian princess and the chance to return home and lead his own people, where he must fight the demons of his past, his family and his countrymen in a long and bitter war for revenge and power.

Told in his own voice, this is the astonishing true story of the most famous warrior in all Christendom: Harald Hardrada, the last Viking.